How are you trying to boot from this system? From live CD?
I've no idea why you're GRUB boot menus would differ if that is the case...

Hi and thank you for the reply. Sorry for my late reply back here!

I think I just made a bootable USB stick from the Live CD ISO using the pendrivelinux tool. Yesterday I was able to make a bootable xubuntu using the same tool, but running sdlmame on it is a complete dog. Donkey Kong is running like a slideshow. Perhaps its a driver issue (the Via CN13000 has a CN700 chipset).

Ok, I tried making another one on another USB stick and this time it boots fine on my old Via Epia CN13000, great distribution I must say!

However I wonder if either the drivers for the system is not the best or perhaps the CPU is just underpowered as a game like Donkey Kong runs only at about 50% speed in Mame (autoframskip will quickly jump to 10/10 and it still runs at about 90% speed, rather unplayable indeed). I noticed I got better performance if I set the resolution for the linux desktop to e.g. 640x480. I thought mame fullscreen would just set the screen to whatever resolution it needed for the actual game? A game like Donkey Kong uses 224x256 so it should have worked fine with 320x240. Perhaps I need to tweak something in the mame.ini manually? Choosing 320x240 from the dropdown config for the primary mame frontend (forgot the name of it now) doesnt seem to have any effect really.

I chose the Vesa graphics options, but I also see there is an xorg option there, might this have better drivers for the CN700 chipset (unichrome Pro). I guess I will have to try that out also as it would be fantastic to run Mame on this old board.

I also tried making a usbstick with FreeDos and AdvanceMame (for DOS) but when I start AdvanceMame the screen text just becomes scrambled and it locks up (perhaps AdvanceMame cant be run from FreeDos but requires MSDOS?).

It's been a while since i booted PA10, all I can remember is that mame works better with Xorg, and in the mame settings, use the "Xvideo" output thing, and even better combined with opengl drivers - you might find yours here: http://akita.scottjarvis.com or the 'xorg_xorg_dri' pet from the pup4 repo, in the puppy package manager.

Disabling sound also helps a lot with speed, but that's not a great option.

A lot of those old games need extra low native resolutions that puppy won't do, nor will many other distros unless built for the job... MAME (and hence it frontends) should change your desktop resolution to whatever you choose though... I use 800x600, works fine for me._________________Akita Linux, VLC-GTK, Pup Search, Pup File Search

Ah thank you for the tip. I will try switching to xorg instead, I just tried starting that last time and saw that it seemed to require a bit of restarting and configuring? I will try to check that out this weekend as well as installing PA10 to the HD so I can experiment some more.

As for OpenGL I will try that after just in case I dont have 100%. I noticed that turning off sound didn nothing to improve speed when I tried that. Although I didnt have speakers connected so I dont really know if I have any sound at all on my PA10 boot now, haha.

I dont mind running at 800x600 or thereabouts really as I wouldnt mind having some raster effects going as well if they can be applied cheaply if I get the games running at 100%. I will only be using this for vertical games like Donkey Kong and PacMan so the games should be easy to run really.

Having a blast with this despite a bit of an issue getting MAME roms to work on this and I'm guessing it's due to me having a severely outdated romset. Noticed the MAME version in 0.136 but I can't seem to find that set.

Which romsets are you guys using, i.e. what will work on PA?

Also have a bit of an issue getting Vice to launch properly using the icon on the dock, namely the C64 part. The C128 works flawlessly but I can only start the C64 emu via the terminal. Any thoughts on that?

Other than that, I love this Puppy! Got all my retro stuff in storage so this is pretty much exactly what I need

Hi again. I am still working on my Donkey Kong bartop build (have a thread at arcadecontrols) and so far I have been using FreeDos and a mame build 0.90b for DOS which worked fine - but I have no sound unfortunately. Before I start getting hold of an old SoundBlaster card, I wanted to try out Puppy Arcade again and a quick test showed that I did indeed get sound output on my embedded AC97 soundchip from the mame distro there, although its ofc very choppy and crackly due to the game not running full speed.

But its toooo sllooooo, it runs at 50% speed so quite useless. I did change the desktop to xorg and had success with that. But from what you said Scott I also need to adjust something in mame.ini to make that use xorg? I also switched to 800x600x16 but its still too slow.

I also believe that the mame version in Puppy Arcade might be a newer one? I hear that for older machines you really should go higher than version 0.106 but unfortunately I have no idea how to get hold of binaries in PET format for Puppy for this version. Neither do I know how I can get hold of the source for 0.106 and how I build that on Puppy Arcade.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! If I can get sound and all working in Puppy Linux and run DK at 100% I will surely use that for my bartop project!

This is an awesome puplet, just wish that Akita and Puppy Arcade would recognize my USB Wifi adapter.

The module doesn't want to recognize my USB Wifi adapter. The module in question is the: "rt2870usb" module. On newer pups it uses the "rt2800sta"/"rt2800usb" module. But it is indeed a RaLink 2870. WHY WON"T IT WORK!!!!!!!_________________The DeLorean is the best car, Period!

First a disclaimer: I'm very new to the MAME scene and not very linux savvy. I've tried to figure this out on my own with no luck

My question is this: is there a way to use a PS2 Hot Rod (SE) to navigate the ROM loader? By default the P1 joystick is mapped to Numpad keys (8, 4, 6, 2) rather than the standard arrow keys, so I can't even navigate around with it. I'd like to hide the keyboard and mouse for normal use of the system, and in order to do that it'd have to boot straight to the rom loader and be navigable by using the Hot Rod.

RejoystickCC doesn't detect it (since it's emulating a keyboard I'd assume) so I can't use that to change the controls in the ROM loader as all of the instructions suggest.

First a disclaimer: I'm very new to the MAME scene and not very linux savvy. I've tried to figure this out on my own with no luck

My question is this: is there a way to use a PS2 Hot Rod (SE) to navigate the ROM loader? By default the P1 joystick is mapped to Numpad keys (8, 4, 6, 2) rather than the standard arrow keys, so I can't even navigate around with it. I'd like to hide the keyboard and mouse for normal use of the system, and in order to do that it'd have to boot straight to the rom loader and be navigable by using the Hot Rod.

RejoystickCC doesn't detect it (since it's emulating a keyboard I'd assume) so I can't use that to change the controls in the ROM loader as all of the instructions suggest.

Any ideas?

Can't you just turn numlock off?

If I turn it off, I can navigate Gtkdialog programs (Rom Loader is one of them) with the numpad - so I assume that it's possible to do it with anything that emulates the numpad, no? (I am also not an expert on MAME, linux drivers, hardware support, etc!)

I think you may be right about RejoystickCC not being usable with it, if it does indeed emulate a keyboard...

If I had one to play with it would be easy to get it up and running I think, but I dont... Sorry.

It should find more joypads, might help, might not... Save it over the old one (in /root/Startup), and make it executable (right click on it, go to properties and click on the 'Exec' boxes at the bottom...).._________________Akita Linux, VLC-GTK, Pup Search, Pup File Search

For whatever reason numlock doesn't seem to function - maybe it's because the keyboard runs through the joystick and that's disabling it, not sure. Regardless the light for numlock is off on the keyboard that's attached through the HotRod and hitting the numlock key didn't help.

Thanks for the ideas though. I have tried out a different solution (ubuntu + Wahcade, if anyone's wondering) that's more focused on MAME rather than a spread of emulators and that seems to be working better with the joystick solution. It took more fiddling around to get it set up but it supports the HotRod out of the box.

Thanks for the work on PuppyArcade - if I build out a system to be played on a joypad instead of an oldschool joystick controller I'll have to check it out again.

Hello,
I'm new to Puppy Linux, and especially arcade. I wanted to be able to play some of the games I played when I was younger, but I have one big problem: how do you save a game in the Game Boy Advance emulator?

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